Canada’s First Chief Accessibility Officer on the Road to a Barrier-Free 2040

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Canada is the first country in the world to appoint a Chief Accessibility Officer. A year into the job, Stephanie Cadieux told Double Tap that the hardest part is not the built environment everybody pictures — it is everything after it.

The role was created under the Accessible Canada Act, the legislation aiming for a barrier-free Canada by 2040. Cadieux spoke to Double Tap’s Marc Aflalo on the very first episode of our AMI-tv sister show Access Tech Live.

“My role is as an advisor, an independent advisor to the minister responsible for the act,” she said, “and I am there to monitor the progress that we’re making as a country towards becoming barrier-free by 2040.”

The path to the role

Cadieux sustained a spinal cord injury at 18. “That set my life on a super different path than the one I had intended, but it’s been a really interesting one,” she said. After a spell as an online entrepreneur in the late 1990s she moved into the disability sector, spending eight years as an advocate with Spinal Cord Injury BC, then almost 14 years as an MLA in the British Columbia legislature.

“When I took the role, I said to myself, well, I think this is it. This is what I was meant to do.”

She describes the job itself as a campaigning one. “I’m really the cheerleader. I’m the champion for the work ahead. I’m there to say to people, why is it important that we include accessibility and think about accessibility from the start?”

Ramps are the easy part

Asked where Canada actually stands, Cadieux was candid that the measurement itself is unfinished. “What are the metrics and how do we figure that out? How do we set a baseline? How do we measure from it? It’s not simple, we’re at a starting point.”

She was equally candid about the scale of what remains. “It doesn’t mean that people with disabilities have access to everything at all. We are recognising we have a long way to go.”

The built environment, she argued, is where everybody’s mind goes first — wheelchairs, ramps, power door openers — and it is also the most tractable. “Understanding it and doing it are two different things,” she said. “When we move along the path of accessibility and start thinking about things that are a little less obvious — technology, access to all aspects of technology, and whether or not they are inclusive and accessible. What about policy design? What about programme and service delivery? It’s much more complex and difficult work.”

“Nothing without us”

Cadieux returned repeatedly to the principle she says sits at the centre of the act, and sharpened the familiar phrasing as she did so.

“Ultimately we will get it right if we include people with disabilities, and that is at the core of the act,” she said. “The centre of the act is nothing without us. Not nothing about us without us — just nothing without us.”

That includes accepting the work will go wrong along the way. “Sometimes we’re not gonna get it right on the first try. Maybe not even on the second. But the important thing is being open to it, asking the right questions, being open to the feedback, not taking it personally if we get it wrong.”

Resources

• Office of the Chief Accessibility Officer: canada.ca
• Accessible Canada Act: laws-lois.justice.gc.ca